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Exclusive interview: meet Demis Hassabis, London's megamind who just sold his company to Google for £400m

A huge deal with Google has just made Demis Hassabis one of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs. The London artificial intelligence genius speaks for the first time about how clever computers can cure cancer and why it’s so hard to satisfy a brain as big as his

Which one piece of technology would Europe’s most valuable artificial intelligence expert be likely to have with him at all times, I wonder? Demis Hassabis looks at me with a hint of embarrassment. “I tend to be the sort of person who waits to see how useful a technology really is before I adopt it,” he says, pre-empting the forthcoming reaction. Out of his pocket the man whose company Google has just paid £400 million to acquire pulls an old, slightly battered iPhone 5. It’s not even the 5S. But what it is, is Apple.

“We’ll have to sort you out,” calls a voice from Team Google. That phone is a false idol in this house of worship. Someone at Google’s Central St Giles HQ no doubt scrambled into action at that very second to find Hassabis a Nexus 5 (Google’s flagship phone) pronto.

Hassabis is the 37-year-old founder and CEO of Bloomsbury-based DeepMind Technologies — the three-year-old neuroscience-inspired artificial intelligence (AI) company that hit the headlines this week when Google bought it.

In one swift move Hassabis has become one of London and the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs and yet, until now, little was known about him or his mysterious firm. “We just like quietly getting on with our work,” he says. He has barely been photographed since his teens. This is his first and only interview following the sale.

“It has been so crazy the last couple of days. It’s a bit strange,” Hassabis says, settling into one of Google’s Seventies-style orange and white chairs. He is a neuroscientist, unaccustomed to this kind of attention. But this man, dressed head-to-toe in casual grey and black but for the flash of Day-Glo green on the topside of the arms of his spectacles, might just be able to change the world.

It is “within the last year,” he says that “Google and Larry [Page, Google co-founder] found out about us. I got an email out of the blue to come and have a meeting.”

DeepMind has been building “learning algorithms — ones that automatically learn how to do things from raw data, rather than being programmed to do things”. Its work is not easy for the layman to get to grips with. “We are not trying to copy or interface with the brain,” explains Hassabis. “We look at state-of-the-art neuroscience and cherry-pick the key principles behind how we think the mind works and see if we can convert them into an algorithm.”

The only public demonstration so far of what his company has achieved was getting his AI to learn how to play Space Invaders on an old Atari computer just by showing it the information on screen. “It turns out games are a perfect testing ground for trying these things out in a controlled setting.”

Demis Hassabis with a vintage ZX Spectrum (Picture: Adrian Lourie)

Sounds clever, but this is just a start. More sophisticated AI will rest on understanding more of the brain’s mechanisms. “Some people believe that the brain is based on one master algorithm, but it’s much messier than that and an artificial system will need multiple algorithms to have all those capabilities.”

Hassabis says that he and his team are “quite hard to impress, we see stuff like Siri [Apple’s “intelligent” personal assistant] and we think, ‘We could do so much better than that’,” but as yet his company is lots of science and “core technology that could be deployed in interesting ways” but not a lot of finished product. Which makes the purchase by Google all the more remarkable. It seems to be a price for, literally, Hassabis’s head.

And why not? His must be one of the greatest brains in the country, perhaps the world. He was a champion chess-player in his early teens, finished his A-levels at 16, built a multi-million-selling videogame by 17, got a double First in computer science from Cambridge, a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL, published research in neuroscience that was listed as one of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2007 and became an academic at MIT and Harvard.

He was born to “quite bohemian” parents and grew up in and around Finchley and Hendon. His mother is Chinese-Singaporean and worked in John Lewis. His father, of Greek Cypriot descent “did lots of different things”, including being a singer-songwriter. “Neither of them are technical at all, which is quite bizarre,” explains Hassabis.

“My interest in AI and computers came from games initially — and that pre-dated even having a computer.” The chess he began aged four. “I got pretty good at that very quickly,” he says.

“The first thing I bought with the prize money from one of my big wins was a Spectrum computer. I had this feeling that this was a kind of magical device. Looking back on it now, just as if you think of car as a machine that amplifies human capabilities physically the computer to me felt like that for the mind. I think I intuitively understood that as a child.”

The next step was learning to programme. “I taught myself when I was eight or nine, from books and magazines,” he says as though this is just what any child might do. Yet he was no ordinary child. “It must have been quite hard for my parents to know what to do about that. I think I ended up channelling my very early years into chess because it was something I was good at that my parents could understand. Chess and games give you a lot of skills you can transfer to business or AI, but I always regarded it more as training. It was too narrow to spend your entire brain on for your entire life.”

Finding enough of a challenge is a recurrent theme in Hassabis’s life. He was a comprehensive schoolboy, attending Christ’s College in Finchley. “I jumped a few years ahead,” he says. “Schoolwork wasn’t that challenging but I had so many extra-curricular activities — programming professional games — that took up my excess brain power.”

Even now he struggles to satisfy his mind. He likes to cook and play and watch football, but “it would be very rare for me to go through a whole day without doing something mentally challenging — whether work or playing chess or poker, otherwise I get quite bored”.

He admits that since the news broke of the Google acquisition “most people are pretty surprised who know us because they don’t really know what I was up to”. Even just talking to friends about his job is tricky because, “it’s quite complicated and not easy to talk about over a casual dinner. I have to know people very well”.

This risks painting a picture of a reclusive character, too brainy to be adept at social interaction. But that doesn’t represent Hassabis, who is clearly as much a communicator as an analyst — despite saying that the last three years have not actually afforded him much time for a social life.

He still lives in Highgate, north London, with his wife — a molecular biologist — and his two sons who are five and eight. They also go to comprehensive school and, “are both amazing in their own right”, says Hassabis, but he is wary of talking too much about them.

“I don’t want to put too much pressure on them. I think coding should be taught at school to make sure the UK produces the next generation of skilled programmers, but I think children should be encouraged to follow their passions and if they don’t know what they are yet, to explore as many things as possible until they find something they love and then work hard at it to be as good as they can at it. I think that leads to a very happy, fulfilling life.”

He’d be as happy, he says, if his sons were to become musicians as if they followed in his footsteps in AI or to Google.

Larry Page found out about Hassabis because “we have a very well-connected and well-known billionaire investor base — people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It’s quite a small-knit community.”

As well as his own expertise, Google has bought Hassabis’s team. “We’re around 75 people now and we’re going to increase in size and add another 50 engineering and science jobs for the world’s best people and the talent around here,” he says. “The team we have hand-picked and painstakingly put together. I’ve been tracking some of these people for 10 years. It has been a lifetime of building these relationships.”

Even Hassabis himself has not quite figured out exactly what he’ll be doing for Google, although his original statement post-sale was that he would be “tackling some of society’s toughest problems”.

“What I meant is, as a society we would like to make more progress in areas such as understanding how climate, macroeconomics or big diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s work, but they are so complex and difficult for human minds to master. I think we are going to need artificial help to aid scientists and economists to understand these complicated systems.”

IN 20 years he hopes “that I will have been a part of Google producing some incredible tools to impact everyone’s lives in a positive way, be that with an ultimate personal assistant that thinks of things before you know you want them or incredible research to solve diseases. I’m looking forward to finding out about Google’s Calico arm.”

He is referring to Google’s new company that Larry Page has said will focus on health and wellbeing including “tackling ageing and illness”.

One thing Hassabis won’t be doing for Google, however, is leaving London. “I persuaded some of our early investors like Peter Thiel, who has a big belief in Silicon Valley being a mecca for technology, that there is a lot of incredible untapped talent here. I think we punch above our weight,” Hassabis says of London.

“We have some of the world’s best universities producing all these amazingly smart people, scientists and programmers who want to work in technology that might change the world. There are not as many opportunities in the UK as in San Francisco, so if you’re that kind of company and you base yourself here you have a lot more available talent of the highest calibre that is looking for something more interesting than going into finance or down the usual routes in London.”

Although Hassabis hasn’t yet involved himself in the Tech City/Silicon Roundabout community he believes “it’s really great to show that London and the UK can create cool technology and be at the forefront of these cutting-edge fields. It isn’t just limited to Silicon Valley or New York, it’s going on right here.”

Aside from anything “I’m a north London boy, born and bred ... There’s no reason to move.” He’s a £400 million mind, and he belongs to London.